Unity Isn't Conformity, Mr. Biden
Republicans have a moral duty to remind Democrats that their majorities are slim and that there are indeed other points of view.
Perhaps the message was slowly received at first.
The Biden Administration isn’t just pushing for $1.9 trillion in stimulus spending, but it is doing so to the point of recklessness. Barely a week has gone by, and Biden’s White House team is already talking of reconciliation bills and refusing to work with Republicans in a narrowly divided Congress.
Sound a lot like Richmond, doesn’t it?
“For without unity, there is no peace, only bitterness and fury…. Yet hear me clearly: disagreement must not lead to disunion.
“This is a time of testing. We face an attack on democracy and on truth. A raging virus. Growing inequity. The sting of systemic racism. A climate in crisis. America’s role in the world.
“Any one of these would be enough to challenge us in profound ways. But the fact is we face them all at once, presenting this nation with the gravest of responsibilities. Now we must step up. All of us.”
— Biden Inaugural Speech, 20 January 2021
One might very well ask who is to be tested here?
Let’s start with the raw economics. During the Trump administration, a series of stimulus bills built upon strong economic fundamentals built long before the pandemic allowed the American taxpayer to amass over $1.6T in savings — right now.
The concern from economists and Republicans (and global markets) is that in an effort to push Biden’s wider political agenda, an additional $1.9T of spending will lead to enormous inflationary pressures rather than an economic revival.
With the Federal Reserve holding interest rates at zero and the COVID-19 vaccinations at pace in most of the nation (sans Virginia), inflation should not be an idle concern, as it will make the savings and earnings of working class Americans worth that much less.
Yet it isn’t just the Biden administration’s spending habits that have most Republicans annoyed. Biden’s slew of executive orders — from abortion to transgenderism to reversing his promise on the Keystone XL pipeline — are the very thing that Democrats railed against during the Trump era.
True, most of the Biden EOs are worthless directives to that mystical fourth branch of government — the bureaucracy. Yet the message from Schumer, Pelosi, and Biden is very clear at this point.
Unity, it seems, is conformity.
This seems to be the problem of most political religions. All parties are designed by their nature to grow (or they die). Yet there is no limit to their growth after all. Majorities aren’t exactly defined or delimited, and minority parties chafe under a majority that is completely deaf to the other side.
Simone Weil isn’t exactly a household name, but she used to be. In her 1957 essay regarding why political parties were ultimately totalitarian, Weil identified this intrinsic will to power within most political ideologies:
To assess political parties according to the criteria of truth, justice and the public interest, let us first identify their essential characteristics.
There are three of these:
A political party is a machine to generate collective passions.
A political party is an organisation designed to exert collective pressure upon the minds of all its individual members.
The first objective and also the ultimate goal of any political party is its own growth, without limit.
Because of these three characteristics, every party is totalitarian – potentially, and by aspiration. If one party is not actually totalitarian, it is simply because those parties that surround it are no less so. These three characteristics are factual truths – evident to anyone who has ever had anything to do with the every-day activities of political parties.
As to the third: it is a particular instance of the phenomenon which always occurs whenever thinking individuals are dominated by a collective structure – a reversal of the relation between ends and means.
As it refers to Biden’s precarious position in the White House, one can instantly pick up on the news of the day and see how the Democrats intend to play their hand: (1) whip up the passions of the public, (2) regiment conformity among the rank and file, and (3) impose their will ad infinitum for as long as the working majority lasts.
Don’t worry. Republicans do this, too.
Weil goes a bit further in the critique. Goodness, Weil argues, should be the only proper end of the state. Yet for political parties, winning is the only metric of success. By winning and through winning, they demonstrate their value. If political parties must change what they purport to believe in order to win? They do so.
Of course, in order to “win” one must secure power, and there is no end to the securing of power one must do in order to allow a political party — with vague pretentions to the good, but absolute intentions towards the end of winning — to amass the power it requires. Thus in the end, all political religions are totalitarian.
William F. Buckley Jr. recognized this fatal flaw in most political ideologies and their utopian schemers. Conservatives in the American tradition stood athwart history yelling STOP! The great contest was between the Social Engineers and world-builders vs. those who defended the organic moral order; and on the side of libertarians, conservatives, excellence, and honest intellectual combat.
These individuals drilled themselves in the old classical liberal tradition of Jefferson and Burke, read deeply of men such as Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver, listened intently to the warnings of those such as Whittaker Chambers, and saw that men such as Goldwater, Reagan, and Paul were warning us of an opposite world our manifold differences — and there are more than a few — would be subsumed by a coercive power far greater than any individual’s ability to resist.
Perhaps we should not be too hard on Biden for following his own playbook. Perhaps unity for the Democrats really does entail that great conflation of society with government, and ultimately does impose rather than propose.
After all, it was Buckley who famously pronounced that leftists love to do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, then are incredulous to learn that there are indeed other points of view.
Don’t be too alarmed that Biden and his Democratic apparatchiks are confusing unity with conformity. Just don’t be shy about reminding them that there are — indeed — other points of view. As Jonathan Haidt reminds us, you’d be surprised at who might discover that they aren’t as left-wing as they imagined themselves to be after a few cups of coffee with a friend.
Shaun Kenney is the editor of The Republican Standard, former chairman of the Board of Supervisors for Fluvanna County, and a former executive director of the Republican Party of Virginia.